FCC to Get a Lesson in Net Neutrality: Dial-Up Speeds to Websites

Since the FCC won't take net neutrality seriously, users take matters into their own hands

The FCC’s plans for the Internet are far from ideal and over 100,000 people have already expressed their displeasure with the plans, the media has exploded with articles about net neutrality and the biggest names in the tech industry have joined forces to urge the FCC to drop plans of creating an Internet fast lane.

Even so, the FCC’s Chairman, Tom Wheeler, seems to be dead set on his ideas, which he has defended every chance he had.

So what did the community do? Well, it gave the FCC a taste of its own medicine by demonstrating just what will happen if net neutrality vanishes and a handful of ISPs are allowed to do whatever they want.

Site owners around the globe started to throttle the FCC’s IP address ranges to dial-up modem speeds with an nginx configuration. This will effectively give them a taste of what life will be like for users who visit sites that don’t have enough cash to pay Comcast, Verizon and the entire gang of ISPs in the United States.

So far, it’s unclear just how many site admins have taken these steps, since Reddit users aren’t exactly keen to give out their official names and workplaces, but there are hundreds of comments from people interested in the idea.

Basically, when FCC employees visit the affected sites, they don’t connect to them at normal speeds, but rather at dial-up speeds, which no one wants to return to.

In fact, this didn’t originate on Reddit, but rather on a blog post on Neocities, a popular free web hosting service that powers quite a few websites.

“Since the FCC seems to have no problem with this idea, I've (through correspondence) gotten access to the FCC's internal IP block, and throttled all connections from the FCC to 28.8kbps modem speeds on the Neocities.org front site, and I'm not removing it until the FCC pays us for the bandwidth they've been wasting instead of doing their jobs protecting us from the ‘keep America's internet slow and expensive forever’ lobby,” reads the post signed by Kyle Drake, who dubs himself a “professional cyberpunk.”

Redditors seem quite excited with the idea and they’re hoping that Google, Facebook and others join right in and fix their own codes to make sure the FCC knows exactly what it would do to regular citizens with its new set of rules.